A Visual Lexicon: A Language Learning Must Have!

Why do language instructors artificially separate text and speech from the visual lexicon? 

A lexicon is a catalog of a language’s wordstock and the rules or grammar that dictates the combination of the stock of words into meaningful sentences.

Our visual language is the system by which communication uses visual elements to be effective: pragmatics, semiotics, gestures, images, diagrams, maps, and other forms of nonverbal communication. Speech or text does not act alone effectively, not without the help of emoticons, anyway.

The structural units of visual language includes line, shape, color, form, motion, texture, pattern, direction, orientation, scale, angle, space, and proportion. The same structural elements that create our written language – add sound and you have our spoken language. These are also known as the formal elements in art analysis.

Notebooks of all those listed. Found at this link.

Therefore, a visual lexicon is the collection or ‘visualstock’ and the elements or visual-grammar that dictates the combination of intersecting visual elements and text/words to create meaningful communication.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s 15^th century sketchbooks are famous examples of visual lexicons. Other famous visual lexicon notebookers that changed the modern era include Thomas Edison, Charles Darwin, Alexander Graham Bell, and Albert Einstein.

Creative genius is found at the intersections of the visual and verbal. Our entire Internet culture exists at the same intersection: it is the living love-child of these innovators’ notebooks (read Steve Job’s biography – official and unofficial).

Interbreed and Interrelated: Intertextuality.  

Image found here. 

The idea of intertextuality suggests that all images relate to other cultural texts such as books, poems, other images, movies, commercials, and music, etc. (See Wilson, 2003, citation below). 

Turn intertexuality inside out: an utterance never exists without relating emoticons, images, books, poems, other utterances, movies, commercials, and music, etc.

Million dollar question: 

So, why are so many EFL/ESL instructors telling our students’ to check their visual lexicons at the door to learn language (and then wondering why their students fall asleep at their desks)?

Encourage the development of your students’ visual lexicons.

Some scholars suggest that L2 learners need a vocabulary of at least 5,000 words for a good working knowledge of the English language (as well as an understanding of syntax, morphology, and pragmatics, etc.). Most L1 English speakers are thought to have a vocabulary of 20K or so words.

Encouraging students to build and maintain visual lexicons increases their meaningful encounters with words or even the meaning of sentences or phrases. For example, an assignment can be on creating visual lexicons based on a series of idioms or ideas.

One of our visual lexicons for Orientalism. Found at this link.

In an intermediate level class, my Korean university students created visual lexicons based on the concept of Orientalism. They also applied critical thinking skills to further break down the image and its meaning. 

My students can now discuss their opinions on the concept of Orientalism by analyzing an image. The proficiency level of these students ranged from intermediate-low to advanced-mid.

 A visual lexicon was created to bridge the huge proficiency gaps between the students in the class. All of the students saw an increase in their ability to use academic vocabulary, and some students saw a dramatic improvement in the sophistication of their sentence structures (verbal and written).

Facilitate your Da Vincis and Einsteins to produce their online notebooks…   

Technology is crucial to the development and long-term maintenance of visual lexicons. 

Mural.ly collaborative project. 

Pinterest.com is a great tool to collect, store, and organize images whereas Mural.ly is a user-friendly location to produce visual essays. Mural.ly is an excellent resource for large collaborative mind maps or to help students outline presentations and essays.

This semester, my novice level students produced family introductions on MindMapper.com, a mind mapping app that is cellphone friendly. All the students posted their family MindMapper.com on our class Facebook.com timeline with pictures of their family (or pictures who they wished their family to be).

MindMapper "My Family" assignment. 

Posted on our Facebook timeline to share with classmates. 

There are a litany of the other social bookmarking, mindmapping, and intertext apps that will help you and your students' to build visual lexicons. 

Resources

Wilson, B. (2003). Of diagrams and rhizomes: Visual culture, contemporary art, and the impossibility of mapping the content of art education. Studies in Art Education, 44(3), 214-229.

Celebrating Connected Educator Month (October)!!

To connect or not connect, that is the question of the modern educator…

In “What ‘Connected Education’ Looks Like: 28 Examples FromTeachers All Over”, Katherine Schulten provides a litany of positive ways that social media (Facebook to Edmodo) can be integrated into a wide variety of classrooms.

Three teachers used Edmodo to ask students to explore individual profiles of 19^th-century immigrants. The result was the students showed empathy, as well as “demonstrated deeper understanding of the mechanism by which immigrants sought cultural and societal integration in 19^th-century America” (Schulten, 2013).

AFTER THOUGHT: Wouldn’t an amazing next step be exploring the profiles of contemporary immigrants and refugees? The faces of the 19^th-century immigrants were historically much different than those coming to the United States today.

An English Language Learner (ELL) instructor at a community college is asking students to use their cell phones to take images of new vocabulary and idioms that they encounter outside of the classroom. They are using social media to build their own word lists, as well as bridge the real world with the classroom.

AFTER THOUGHT:  I would love to see those students use the images to produce storyboards that narrate their stories (fiction or real time/past or present).

Why so much hate? 

Social media is banned in the majority of the school districts across the United States.

Recently, the Los Angeles Unified School District reinitiated a $1 billion plan to put an iPad in the hands of all students. The first attempt failed because the students cracked the security settings that had locked out Internet and social media. Officials quickly confiscated all the electronic devices once they discovered the breech.

So, the unified school district wants the students to use disabled iPads to their fullest potential? I just keep getting the image of someone tying my feet together and yelling, “Run! Run!”

My daughter has long since graduated from high school (last January), but I have several memories of being asked for math help. You have lost me after basic algebra (although I can hold my own in statistics – the brain is a perplexing place to function).

After the initial eye-rolling and teenager let-down, her fingers would start wildly tapping the keyboard like a mad-scientist on the brink of world destruction when an “Ah-Ha!” would echo triumphantly through the apartment… one or several of her friends had tutored her via a variety of virtual resources from social media to video to watching real-time examples on a shared virtual document or brain storming app.

They didn’t do her homework for her. They actually helped her study virtually. They did for her what I could not.

According to Patricia Deubel (2009), the National School Board Association published studies that showed that “almost 60 percent of studentswho use social networking talk about education topics online and, surprisingly,more than 50 percent talk specifically about schoolwork.” An unofficial survey of my daughter’s social networking habits, I can easily buy into that statistic.

Social media was crucial, and still is, to her academic success.

BUT what are students doing the other 50% of time?

The answer to that question depends on what author or resource that you decide to read.

My daughter and one of our
favorite students, Se-Ra. 

Susan J. Brooks-Young (2010) argues that social media replaced all the banned public gathering spaces where youths can no longer congregate. Brooks-Young cites a collection of curfew and loitering laws that make it near impossible for students to gather, be loud, and socialize without getting into trouble with the lawman.

Insert old Western Sheriff here saying, “Why, our town shuts down at sunset and only the outlaws and teenagers roam the streets in this here parts… and I know how to take care of the outlaws and teenagers… Why, yes I do.”

Social media – good, bad, or ugly – is the public social space for millions of teens (and now people over 35 are no longer social media strangers – we have to figure out what our kids are doing somehow).

Many authors are contributing social media with the negativity and disassociation. In The Winter of Our Disconnect, Susan Maushart cites that our bodies actually produce chemical reactions when in a conversation with someone (while in the flesh) that doesn’t occur virtually. Scientists claim that depression and other ill effects can set in without face-to-face conversations. 

Maushart also goes on to identify examples of teenage violence that the perpetuator contributed to “just needing to feel alive” or some such, after being isolated in his virtual world, and apparently, was taken aback when her son could relate to such thinking.

SIDENOTE: I must admit that I don’t know any teenagers who use the dialect that Maushart is trying to capture in her epic life's tale of a family off technology… it is just makes me uncomfortable reading it (and I don’t know why).

Let’s get serious for a moment.

Both authors noted that the number one issue online is cyber-bullying and there has been a rash of accusations (accompanied withpictures of proof) followed by young suicides that have verified that the virtual world is just as weighted as the empty streets once used to be for GenXers (and all generations before). Playground bullying has been taken an unfortunate new sophistication.

Are educators more likely to identify potential cyber-bullying, if they are on the same social networks as their students? What is hall monitoring in the iGeneration age? 

Evidence has also been found that the students feel more connected to their instructors when they are on regulated social media together, as part of their class projects and curriculum. I have found that my university students are more responsive and accountable. It shows in their work and attendance.

I also know that my daughter would have never made it through math without it…

How effective is to always power-down every time that they enter into a classroom? Do we really have their attention or just their obedience?

As an educator, I prefer to have their attention.